On which I write about the books I read, science, science fiction, fantasy, and anything else that I want to. Currently trying to read and comment upon every novel that has won the Hugo and International Fantasy awards.

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Tuesday, April 26, 2016

2016 Hugo Award Finalists

Location: MidAmeriCon II in Kansas City, Missouri.

Comments: At the outset, one must make clear that the list of 2016 Hugo Finalists is a giant pile of crap. Although a few gems can be found among the steaming rancid pile - Ancillary Mercy, The Fifth Season, Uprooted, Binti, and a handful of others - most of the finalists on this year's ballot have no business being on any awards list of any kind. Some of them really didn't deserve to be published to begin with, and probably wouldn't have been if it were not for a certain racist, sexist, homophobic dipshit with an ax to grind and a pile of money handed to him by his mother.

Given that there is little that can be done about the overall low-quality of the Hugo ballot this year, the question to be asked is this: What can one learn about the state of the slates from this set of results. What is most interesting about the 2016 Hugo finalists is that they offer fairly strong evidence that the Sad Puppy campaign that Larry Correia started four years ago in a desperate attempt to "Get Larry a Hugo" has been reduced to an almost trivial irrelevancy. Despite their claims to be "embiggening" the Sad Puppy campaign for its fourth iteration, the reality is that it has shrunk away to almost nothing of consequence. As a means of pushing works onto the Hugo ballot, the Sad Puppy campaign was a mostly dismal failure. For the most part, the only works that the from the Sad Puppy list that made it onto the Hugo ballot fell into two categories:

The two definite exceptions are the nominations for John Joseph Adams and Mike Glyer, who were both on the Sad Puppy list but not on the Rabid Puppy slate and not nominated for a Nebula Award, which is unsurprising as the Nebula Awards do not have either a Best Editor or Best Fan Writer category. Given that both men have been previously nominated for multiple Hugos, thinking they needed a Puppy assist to get onto the ballot seems to be quite stretch. The other possible exception is Alyssa Wong, who was also on the Sad Puppy list but not on the Rabid Puppy slate: She had a short story nominated for a Nebula Award in 2016, and although that doesn't exactly match being a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, it seems close enough to say that it counts.

On the other hand, several works and individuals that were quite prominent on the Sad Puppy list were unable to get onto the list of finalists. The Puppies promoted a novelette by Clifford Simak that didn't find its way onto the ballot. Novels by Michael Z. Williamson and John Ringo appeared on the Sad Puppy list but failed to reach the list of finalists. The short story Tuesdays with Molokesh the Destroyer, originally put on the 2015 Sad Puppy slate despite being ineligible in that year, also failed to make it to the finalists list despite actually being eligible this year. Episodes of Daredevil and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. promoted by the Sad Puppies failed to make the ballot. And so on. As Anne Bellet said last year, Theodore Beale is in the driver's seat, and the Sad Pups are just along for the ride. At this point, it should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention that the Sad Puppies have essentially been doing nothing but carrying Theodore Beale's water for him for two years now. As an independent force, they are effectively irrelevant now. They have, in the list of finalists that appears below, been reduced to asterisks, which note which finalists appeared on the Sad Puppy slate.

In previous years, the Sad Puppies built a narrative about how they wanted to make the Hugo Awards reflect more "mainstream" tastes. A narrative about how they wanted to promote popular authors for recognition. A narrative about how they wanted to return to the "good old days" of nuts and bolts science fiction and pulp adventure sensibilities. A narrative about how they wanted to "reclaim" science fiction from the icky liberals who had tainted it and promote the conservative-oriented fiction that they "knew" was what the majority of fans really liked. The fact that this myriad of narratives was shown to be pure bullshit numerous times over was not an impediment to the Sad Puppies attempting to advance them time and again. But now, with their movement co-opted by Theodore Beale and his Rapid Puppies, even those flimsy excuses for unethically gaming the Hugo Award nomination process have simply evaporated. It is now clear that there is nothing left to the "Puppies" except trolling.

Beale, the architect behind the Rabid Puppies, claims that the Puppies are a "popular reaction to mediocrities and absurdities being presented as the very best that the field has to offer", but many of the nominees he placed on his 2016 slate reveal that this bold claim is simply a lie. Beale and the Rabid Puppies have negligible substance other than an organized trolling campaign, and have little to no actual regard for actual science fiction. Looking at several of the slate-based nominations for Space Raptor Butt Invasion to If You Were an Award, My Love, to the panoply of crap in the Best Related Work category that ranges from insipid to borderline slander, it is obvious that the dominant unifying themes are to troll the science fiction community and shamelessly try to promote the slipshod work of his vanity publishing company Castalia House, presumably trying to sell his products to the same people he is trolling and insulting.

Once one clears away the obvious trolling picks and the blatant self-promotions for Castalia House works, there are a couple of choices from the Rabid Puppy slate that were not terrible, but by and large they are incredibly conventional and almost uninteresting selections. In many cases they are works by authors who have had no trouble in the past getting onto the Hugo Ballot on their own such as Neal Stephenson, Alastair Reynolds, and Lois McMaster Bujold. With these choices Beale is simultaneously trying to get in front of a parade so he can claim to be leading it, and tainting their presence on the ballot. Being on the Rabid Puppy slate (and to a lesser extent, being on the Sad Puppy list) makes the nominations of these works suspect. Does Bujold's presence on the list of finalists represent a true choice of actual fans who read her work and voted based on merit, or is it the result of political bloc-voting and trolling? The fact that there is no way to know means that all of the finalists on this year's list will once again have a shadow cast over their selection. By promoting these works, the Puppies of both stripes have done the authors they claim to love no favors. In fact, they have diminished what should be a happy moment by raising doubt about the validity of the resulting nominations.

The truly sad thing about all of the effort that unscrupulous people like Beale have put into gaming the Hugo nomination process is that they will never get what they want. The finalists who are "honored" by being selected by a partisan political faction will always face those who, quite justly, question the legitimacy of their presence on the ballot. If the goal of the Sad Pups was to recognize the works they thought were good, the way they have gone about doing so has made suspect the presence on the ballot of the works they think are good. In many cases, their efforts have exposed that the authors they have placed on the simply aren't particularly talented, putting them before a wider audience when their work was simply unready for the exposure. Paradoxically, the efforts of the Puppies to promote the authors they claim to love has served to diminish those authors' reputations. Is it any wonder that several authors asked to be removed from the Sad Puppy list, or expressed dismay when they found out they were on the Rabid Puppy slate? They know, as the Pups do not, that being associated with such toxic groups is damaging to one's reputation, even if the association is involuntary.

Even those Pups who have chosen destruction as their goal, as Beale has when he says he wants to "burn the Hugos to the ground", are on a quixotic quest. Leaving aside the fact that such a goal is almost certainly impossible to achieve, should he succeed at doing so, it will be a Pyrrhic victory at best. There are numerous other awards, many of which are entirely immune to his influence. If the Hugos become just a mouthpiece for the Rabid Puppies (or the Sad Puppies), then fans will stop paying attention to them and look somewhere else as a means to recognize good genre fiction such as the British Science Fiction Awards, the Nebula Awards, and the Clarke Award. Sure, something will be lost with the passing of the Hugos, but fandom will move on and find a new indicator of quality, leaving the Pups sitting by themselves in a mostly empty room.

That the Pups will continue to dominate the nominating process is doubtful: As noted before, the Sad Pups have become a pathetic leech upon the Rabid Puppies, and when one looks at the Rabid Puppy slate, one can see that the Rabid Puppy strength is somewhat less than one might suppose. The Rabid Puppies dominated most of the finalist slots in several categories where there are generally fewer participants voting, such as Fanzine, Fan Artist, and the short fiction categories, but in categories like Best Novel, even the Sad Puppy list and the Rabid Puppy slate pulling together couldn't get Somewhither onto the Hugo finalist list. The Pups have enough support to overwhelm smaller categories, but their lack of success in the larger ones indicates that they are right on the borderline in terms of effectiveness. Even a minor rule change in how votes are tallied could probably tip the balance of power against the Pups.

But even more to the point, the awards are not the truly important part for actual fans. Yes, awards are fun to participate in, and I am sure they are nice to receive, but the awards are the coda at the end of the relationship between an author and fans, not the highlight. There are several books, stories, television shows, and movies that I think are Hugo-worthy that did not receive slots on the list of finalists, but I still got to enjoy them. No amount of Hugo-nomination chicanery will take that away from me or any of the other voters who participated honestly and voted for the works we love. Even without a Hugo nod, we will still love those works. Fans will still be fans of things that they love, and will still not care about most of the things that the Pups push onto the Hugo ballot with block voting. Both of the Puppy campaigns were built on spite - Larry Correia has openly admitted that he started the Sad Puppy campaign out of spite. Throughout the existence of the Sad and Rabid Puppy campaigns, the barely suppressed rage of its adherents has been readily apparent, and in some cases (such as during Brad Torgersen's not infrequent frothing meltdowns over the last year or so), the rage has been quite openly expressed. Because their motivation for participating is based on anger and hate, the Pups will always fundamentally misunderstand actual fans, who love what they love not out of a desire to spite someone else, but out of actual love for the thing in question. In the end, the Pups will fail because they are founded on the false premise that they can use their anger to change what people love about genre fiction by force.

Addendum II: On May 1th, 2016, Black Gate withdrew its nomination from the Best Fanzine category, citing their belief that their presence on the list of finalists was only due to the fact that they had appeared on the Rabid Puppy slate, and they didn't want to be associated with Theodore Beale. Black Gate was replaced on the list of finalists by the fanzine Lady Business.

Note I: The finalists marked with an asterisk (*) appeared on the curated Sad Puppy short list. The entire Sad Puppy recommendation list was quite long, in some categories totaling nearly a hundred works. To create their "final list" the architects of the Sad Puppies 4 campaign tallied the votes and listed the top ten works in each category. This "top ten" list is what I am counting as "being on the Sad Puppy list" for 2016. As a side note, many authors who appeared on the Sad Puppy 4 list did so without their consent. In some cases authors explicitly asked to be removed from the list, only to have their request rejected by the Sad Puppies.

Note II: Here is Cora Buhlert's take on the 2016 Hugo Ballot. She's a lot more forgiving than I am.

Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini

The First Draft of My Appendix N Book by Jeffro Johnson*Safe Space as Rape Room by Daniel Eness*SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police by Theodore BealeThe Story of Moira Greyland by Moira Greyland

4 comments:

Some Rabid Puppy Picks were likely also "Actual Finalists" (by which I presume you mean, able to make the ballot without RP support). The Stephenson, the Bujold, the Liu, and "The Martian" (to name a few) got praise from many quarters and may well have had enough nominations even with RP support. Until you see the post-Hugo statistics from MAC II and do some analysis, IMHO it's disingenuous to say they weren't "Actual Finalists."

Some are more obvious Puppy ringers, of course, like the Butcher, the Tingle, the whole Best Related Work category, and others.

BTW you called one category "Best Nonfiction, Related, or Reference Work" - isn't this just called "Best Related Work" now?

@Kendall: No matter what happens, the finalists who appeared on the Rabid Puppy slate (and to a lesser extent, the Sad Puppy list) will always have a shadow over their selection to the ballot. Even after the statistics are released, it will be impossible to determine what "would" have made it to the ballot and what would not had the Pups not worked to game the nominations process. That's pretty much the point of presenting the list this way. The existence of slates makes even potentially "honest" (and innocent) finalists suspect.

You're right about the category name. I carried it forward from previous years.

File 770 apparently had some kind of server error, but it has been fixed and it is up and running again.

If the Sads did put together a list of ten items per category that would have gone a fair way to sorting my worries. Especially if the top ten were in no particular order(which might be a little much to ask).

@Brendan: You more or less got half your wish with respect to the Sad Pups. This year, their "final list" was ten entries per category long, but it wasn't sorted randomly. Instead, they ranked the entries on the list by how many recommendations each one had gotten on the comment threads they had made soliciting them. The changed format for the Sad Puppy campaign this year probably accounts for their diminished effectiveness (and their diminished obnoxiousness).

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